Russia has shut down four McDonald's restaurants in Moscow for alleged sanitary violations in a move critics said was the latest blow in its tit-for-tat sanctions tussle with the west.

The federal monitoring service for consumer rights and wellbeing announced on Wednesday that the offending outlets included the famous restaurant on Pushkin Square that opened just before the fall of the Soviet Union. The body said the eateries were being shut down for "sanitary violations" discovered during inspections this week.

The agency has a history of banning food from countries out of favour with Moscow, and the move will almost certainly be taken as a political statement in the sanctions war. It has previously banned wine from Georgia and dairy products from Belarus after those two countries began to improve relations with the west. This summer, it has banned canned vegetables, fruit, fish, juice and certain beer and vodka from Ukraine.

Earlier in August, President Putin ordered an embargo on meat, poultry, fish, dairy and produce from the United States, Canada, Australia, Norway and the European Union in response to those countries' economic sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine crisis.

Employees at the Pushkin Square restaurant and another McDonald's directly outside the Kremlin walls said on Wednesday evening they were temporarily closed but refused to provide any more information. In a statement, McDonald's said it was studying the watchdog's complaints to "determine the actions necessary to open our restaurants to customers as soon as possible".

The consumer watchdog said inspections would continue in other McDonald's restaurants. The chain has 430 restaurants in 70 Russian cities and employs more than 35,000 people there.

The complaints about McDonald's date to the end of July, when the Novgorod regional branch of the consumer watchdog filed a suit against McDonald's, demanding certain burgers and milkshakes be banned in Russia on the grounds the fat, protein, carbohydrates and calories they contain "deviate widely from technical norms". "Violations have been found that put the quality and safety of food products in doubt for the whole McDonald's chain," Russia's head sanitary inspector, Anna Popova, said at the time.

McDonald's has said it determines nutritional value and calorie counts according to guidelines approved by the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. In Russia, the McDonald's company itself runs all its restaurants, unlike in most other countries where local franchisees run the branches.

Mikhail Goncharov, owner of the Russian fast-food chain Teremok, described the consumer watchdog's complaints as politicised, calling them a "powerful blow to relations" between the United States and Russia. "McDonald's is a leader in the field, especially when it comes to standards," Goncharov told the business newspaper RBC Daily. "For instance, when we opened our company, we copied them in a lot of ways. For us, they were an example of how to work. And not just for us."

McDonald's restaurants in Russia are almost always crowded. Thousands of people waited hours in line to try a "Beeg Mek" when the first restaurant opened on Pushkin Square in 1990, an event that became symbolic for an era of sweeping political and economic changes.

Russian reaction to the restaurants' closure on Twitter was largely sardonic, with one user pointing out that McDonald's was the official restaurant of the Sochi Olympics.

"I did not speak out when they came for the right to assemble. I did not speak out when they came for the right to free speech. BUT I WON'T LET THEM TAKE AWAY MY RIGHT TO BE FAT," a user named Mikhail Kafanov tweeted.

"I think crazy patriots would do better to fight in Donetsk rather than with McDonald's. If you must fight with something edible, you can fight with vodka," tweeted well-known photojournalist Evgeny Feldman.